Hi!First of all, you may know I'm a Mint lover. It made me stop distro hopping, so congratulations and thankyous to all the developers and other members of the team.But that splendidness and beautiness is what afraids me... Like I was in love with Ubuntu 11.04 (with Gnome Classic) and then they removed it. Will the same happen to Linux Mint? Will they remove MATE, or even Cinnamon, and create some new Apple-ish shell? I love to doubt it, because Mint listens to the community and I'm sure that clem knows that most of the Mint users come from the Gnome 3 hell, but... Is something scheduled for the feature?

Catbuntu wrote:Hi!First of all, you may know I'm a Mint lover. It made me stop distro hopping, so congratulations and thankyous to all the developers and other members of the team.But that splendidness and beautiness is what afraids me... Like I was in love with Ubuntu 11.04 (with Gnome Classic) and then they removed it. Will the same happen to Linux Mint? Will they remove MATE, or even Cinnamon, and create some new Apple-ish shell? I love to doubt it, because Mint listens to the community and I'm sure that clem knows that most of the Mint users come from the Gnome 3 hell, but... Is something scheduled for the feature?

Catbuntu

About making a Apple-ish shell, someone had proved that it could happen. He had already shown how Mint 13 could work with Unity's Dash in Distrowatch last issue. I mentioned that here; viewtopic.php?f=29&t=121558

Mint 13 is the LTS one, which would stay in force until the end of life of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in April 2017. Quantal and Raring would be dead by that time. Both Quantal and Raring are buggy as they adapt their bases to fit the new Unity 3D, which is based on the unstable Compiz 0.9.x. The Compiz devs warn not to use it on production machines. If we do that, we are to expect crashes.

In Quantal and Raring, Ubuntu has made many chnages to the base, changing base applications to match Unity 3D in them. When the Mint 14 was based on Quantal, it inherited those base applications, even though Compiz is not included in Mint 14 Cinnamon. But, whatever the "experimental" bugs of Quantal was inherited by Mint 14, which is buggy than Mint 13 LTS. There is really no use of using a distro made on the base of experimental and buggy Quantal. I had enough of Mint 14 crashing on me, I said sorry and returened to Mint 13, which is sureshot distro. I simply added Nadia repos to it and upgraded it to the newest Cinnamon. The Linux kernal in Mint 13 is quite good and there is no real purpose in upgrading to a newer kernal, but we can install any new kernel to Mint 13.

It is quite interesting that Mint 13 Cinnamon could work with Unity's Dash without its ugly side bar and "global' menu top panel. Hope that person would let us know how he did that.

I read with some mixed feelings that the screensaver is on the R&D list. Of course, Mate really needs improvements in that department. But Xscreensaver's developer, JWZ, pointed out that Gnome & KDE (& now Mate) have all developed their own screensavers to replace xscreensaver, yet all of them have various problems--Mate's screensaver activates during video playback, for instance. JWZ asks that people that want improvements submit patches to him. I wonder whether this route has ever been tried, and if not, why not. He wrote on his web site about people "reinventing the wheel". I think xscreensaver has potential, for example I was able to get it to work pretty well after a couple of hours of fiddling with the config files and reviewing the documentation. If xscreensaver were given some attention by somebody at Ubuntu or LM, it could be viable again. Just has a few problems in the Ubuntu distribution, namely glslideshow's notorious missing helvetica font and the lack of options in the GUI. Glslideshow's GUI is very strange in that to adjust the time between pictures, one has to move a sliding bar, with only a rough idea how much of a delay is being selected.

The roadmap esteban1uy linked to is the roadmap for Linux Mint developed programs, and what features the developers are aiming for to have ready for the linux Mint 15 release. It is a roadmap for the Linux Mint developers, not a roadmap for you to lose sleep over If you didn't know yet, MATE is developed by the MATE developers. Here is their homepage: http://mate-desktop.org/. Linux Mint was the first distro to include MATE as a separate edition, and Clem is part of the MATE team. I see no reason for your fears

And all this talk about the Linux Mint developers removing Cinnamon in favour of some "Apple-ish shell"? How do you come up with this When in doubt, go to the source code... Here are all the recent commits made by developers to the Cinnamon source code: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commits/master. You'll see new features and bug fixes entering the Cinnamon source code weekly. Cinnamon is going nowhere expect forwards

Vincent Vermeulen wrote:The roadmap esteban1uy linked to is the roadmap for Linux Mint developed programs, and what features the developers are aiming for to have ready for the linux Mint 15 release. It is a roadmap for the Linux Mint developers, not a roadmap for you to lose sleep over If you didn't know yet, MATE is developed by the MATE developers. Here is their homepage: http://mate-desktop.org/. Linux Mint was the first distro to include MATE as a separate edition, and Clem is part of the MATE team. I see no reason for your fears

And all this talk about the Linux Mint developers removing Cinnamon in favour of some "Apple-ish shell"? How do you come up with this When in doubt, go to the source code... Here are all the recent commits made by developers to the Cinnamon source code: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commits/master. You'll see new features and bug fixes entering the Cinnamon source code weekly. Cinnamon is going nowhere expect forwards

Vincent Vermeulen wrote:Windows? See this piece on Forbes, then come back and talk about Windows

"Over the years, Ballmer has made a buffoon of himself while turning out wrong call after wrong call on products, markets, and people."

"There is, however, one function that the company continues to fulfill: it operates a well at the foot of a valley where a large population brings its buckets for water. And Microsoft gets to charge a monopoly rent for its “magic” water. Never mind that there are other wells elsewhere offering cheaper water. Many people are still in the habit of coming to this one place.

As long as people continue to buy its software, which costs nothing to manufacture and delivers in some cases gross margins greater than 90%, Microsoft has a “useful” function. But, as can be noted from the trends, this situation is not going to last forever."

Yep article hits the nail on the head. And been seeing the down slide of microsoft last 5 years and their clinging on in desperation that is driving talent from their clutches..

I just read the whole article on the state of Windows, and I am not one bit surprised. I really think Windows 8 is a big nail in their coffin. It's going to be a horrendous failure following too closely behind the Vista debacle.

Completely unfounded fears if you know what goes on in Mint development - Mint will be the last distro to do that. The opposite concern is much more valid, that time will begin to leave Mint behind 5-10 years from now. People grown up with android, iOS and Win 8+ won't know the Windows 95/XP/Gnome 2 nostalgia at the heart of Mint's traditional/conservative approach to the desktop.

Thank you for this thread. That’s all I can say. You most definitely have made this forum into something special. You clearly know what you are doing, you’ve covered so many bases. Thanks!

Back in the time when Windows was just one of several OSes trying to expand on DOS?

Unix was around then and it's still around and thriving.

Mint is just one end of one arm of a long evolution and, while It appears to many that we are on the cusp of another major upheaval in hardware and software development, both Linux and Mint have proved to be very adaptable.